We see lots of phishing attempts for email credentials. This one is slightly different than many others I receive. It pretends to be a message saying “Verify your email to avoid service interruption”.

What is unusual about this set of phishing emails is that the emails are written in Chinese. The webpage is in Chinese, but they are being sent to English speaking email addresses.

They use email addresses and subjects that will entice a user to read the email and open the attachment. A very high proportion are being targeted at small and medium size businesses, with the hope of getting a better response than they do from individual consumers.

I have received several of these today all to different names and email domains on my server.

They all pretend to come from the same sending address postmaster <info@mrc-et.com> but are actually coming from a USA based server that is probably compromised somehow or has an open email relay.

mrc-et.com has not been hacked or had their email or other servers compromised. They are not sending the emails to you. They are just innocent victims in exactly the same way as every recipient of these emails

try again! And make sure you enter the correct password for this email.

You will soon be redirected back!

then you go to a checking page,

Chinese Phishing page

Then you get a success page where it automatically diverts you to your domain home page

We all get very blasé about phishing and think we know so much that we will never fall for a phishing attempt. Don’t assume that all attempts are obvious. Watch for any site that invites you to enter ANY personal or financial information. It might be an email that says “you have won a prize” or “sign up to this website for discounts, prizes and special offers”

All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email. Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day. Or whether it is a straight forward attempt, like this one, to steal your personal, bank, credit card or email and social networking log in details. Be very careful when unzipping them and make sure you have “show known file extensions enabled“, And then look carefully at the unzipped file. If it says .EXE then it is a problem and should not be run or opened.